22″ wide seems to be the popular size these days. One friend commented that 22″ with a pixel format of 1680 x 1050 results in fonts that are vastly more readable than 20″ 1680 x 1050. Although I work on a Dell 20″ 1680 x 1050, I didn’t think the fonts were too small (on Windows XP with default DPI), but I would appreciate fonts slightly larger. And I do think Apple does a fine job of making fonts a bit more readable at the same pixel format: fonts on a 17″ LCD monitor with 1280 x 1024 are bigger on OS X than they are on XP. So I can imagine the slight improvement in readability a 22″ can bring.

The LG Flatron M228WA is a 22″ wide LCD monitor with a 1680 x 1050 pixel format. The design of the M228WA is nothing special, unfortunately. And the stand itself is on the thick side, which can be good: stability. Another unfortunate thing is the use of a TN+Film LCD display. The TN+Film type of LCD is less costly to manufacture, but is not as advanced in terms of color fidelity, contrast ratio at off-angle viewing relative to IPS or PVA technologies. Viewing the display head-on, the M228WA provides a very nice 3000:1 contrast ratio, but that will most likely fall off dramatically as you move from one side to the other. A response time of 5ms should be fast enough for most applications, but not video. I’ll explain in a bit. The video ports (DVI, S-Video, component, composite, and HDMI) suggest that the M228WA can be used like a TV for viewing video. But caveat emptor!

Advanced LCD TVs have a few technologies that minimize motion blur. Motion blur is the single most irritating problem with LCD technology when watching video. There are four technologies that you should look for when going for LCD TVs to get the least amount of motion blur: optically compensated bend (OCB) liquid crystals, over-driving circuitry, black-frame insertion, and 120Hz frequency. (You can Google these terms to find out more than you want to know about them!) The M228WA doesn’t have any of these and my guess is you will be less-than-thrilled watching 720p HD content on it. Also, 1080i content will need to be scaled down to fit the 1680 x 1050 pixel format: scaling almost always reduces picture quality.

Source: PC Launches